Tag Archives: candidate selection

Earlier this month, The Fawcett Society released Strategies for Success, a new report containing research on women’s experiences of selection and election to the UK parliament. Dr Leah Culhane summarises the key findings and argues that political parties must act to reform their internal structures and tackle discrimination head-on if progress is to be made on women’s representation.

It is 100 years since some women first won the vote and approaching 100 years since the first woman was elected to the House of Commons. While progress has been made since then, parliament remains male-dominated; women make up only 32% of all MPs, with significant variation across political parties.

While men are undoubtedly present in greater numbers, the culture of politics, its rules, norms and expectations also continue to reflect a masculinised way of operating. In recent months, heightened attention has been brought to the culture of sexism within parliament, in light of Dame Laura Cox’s report on bullying and harassment and various allegations of sexual misconduct amongst and towards Commons staff. This follows on from previous reports such as Professor Sarah Child’s Good Parliament report, which details the various ways that the infrastructure and culture of the House of Commons has led to an unrepresentative and exclusive parliament.

The new Strategies for Success report makes further inroads into explaining women’s under-representation. The report aimed to revisit the age old question: what enables some people to get through the ‘eye of the needle’ and succeed in getting elected? Consisting of a survey, focus groups and one-to-one interviews with political activists, aspirants, candidates and MPs, it sought to reveal new insights into the journey to political office.

The research finds that while parliament must change, it is political parties and party gatekeepers that play a pivotal role at every stage of the process. Crucially, it shows that women and other traditionally marginalised groups continue to face obstacles at each stage of the political process and that political parties must look inwards and address their own internal cultures, rules and norms, particularly around recruitment and selection. Continue reading →

On 18 June, the Constitution Unit and the Hansard Society co-hosted an event in parliament marking the launch of Representation in Britain, a four-year ESRC funded study of parliamentary candidates standing in the 2015 and 2017 general elections by the Representative Audit of Britain (RAB) team. Lotte Hargrave offers a summary of what was said.

Professor Rosie Campbell, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London

Professor Campbell began by introducing the motivation for the study, citing the need for a reliable source of data on the profiles, motivations, and opinions of parliamentary candidates. The RAB began as a study of candidates standing in the 2015 general election, however following Theresa May’s decision to instigate a snap election, the team also surveyed candidates standing in 2017. Campbell noted the survey’s response rates – 57% in 2015 and 51% in 2017 – figures comparable with, and in some cases higher than, previous candidate studies. Alongside the survey, in 2015, 44 qualitative interviews were carried out that proved invaluable for reinforcing the robust nature of the quantitative data. Campbell highlighted that the purpose of the Audit was not to offer policy recommendations to parties or parliament, but to provide an independent and reliable source of data on the attitudes and experiences of UK parliamentary hopefuls.Continue reading →

Although the polls have tightened, the Conservatives are still widely expected to win a majority in tomorrow’s general election. Oliver Chan looks ahead to what the new intake of Conservative MPs might look like in terms of career background, education, diversity and the extent to which they have pre-existing links to their constituencies. Focusing on Conservative candidates selected in safe retirement seats and 30 non-held marginals, he finds marked differences in the profile of candidates selected.

Despite the tightening of the polls in recent weeks, the Conservatives are still widely expected to win a majority at the general election. A victory would see a batch of newly-minted MPs elected, some of whom will go on to climb the Westminster ladder to the highest echelons of political power.

This post looks at some of the potential members of the new Conservative intake according to a number of demographic and background factors – namely career, education, local versus non-local candidates and diversity (gender, BME and LGBTI status). Candidate background information has been gathered from multiple sources including ConservativeHome, Iain Dale, candidate webpages, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts where applicable and local and national newspaper coverage. This analysis covers the candidates from the 12 seats held by the Conservatives where the incumbent has retired (‘retirement seats’) and the top 30 opposition-held targets in terms of required swing (excluding Copeland, which was gained by the Conservatives in a by-election in February).

This approach allows us to examine the social background of a sample of the potential new Conservative intake, but also offers a valuable opportunity to compare candidates selected for safe seats and opposition-held marginal seats. Of course, this does not suggest that the Conservatives will necessarily gain all of these seats, or indeed that they will not gain other seats that require larger swings, but the analysis provides an early view of what the new Conservative intake might look like, and how candidates selected in safe seats compare to those selected for targets.

In this post Agnes Magyar and Jennifer Hudson show that although the main parties have selected more female candidates for the June 8 election than in 2015, the proportion selected in non-held marginal seats is little changed. Drawing on Chris Hanretty’s election forecast they suggest that there may be little or no improvement in the gender balance of the House of Commons. If the result matched Hanretty’s forecast (as of 12 May) 194 female MPs would be elected, three more than in 2015 but two fewer than the number when parliament was dissolved.

At the 2015 general election 191 female MPs were elected, resulting in a more gender balanced House of Commons than ever before. Yet, despite significant progress, women comprised just 30% of all MPs at the time of dissolution. In a blog last week, we argued – as have others – that the snap election and the centralised selection processes that took place, provided parties with the opportunity to address to further address the imbalance, should they choose to do so. Maria Miller, Chair of the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee – noted: ‘We heard a lot of encouraging promises when we took evidence on this last year from leadership figures in the Conservatives, Labour Party, SNP and the Liberal Democrats, but we expressed concern that warm words had not yet resulted in concrete strategies to deliver more women candidates, particularly in winnable seats.’

The concern that parties are much less likely to select women in winnable seats is not new and was highlighted by Rosie Campbell and Sarah Childs following the 2010 general election. With candidates now selected, we look to see whether parties took advantage of the opportunity, and whether women candidates were selected in parties’ winnable seats.

Selecting women candidates in the snap election

Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have gone about increasing their numbers of female MPs in different ways. Labour introduced all-women shortlists (AWS) in 1997 – tripling their number of female MPs as a result and establishing a leading position among parties with respect to the number of female candidates elected to parliament. Gender quotas, highly controversial at that time, have not ceased to be subject to debate. Yet, by now all major parties have come to advocate, one way or another, a fairer balance between men and women in the Commons. Following years of reluctance the Liberal Democrats have now adopted AWS, following the return of an all-male group of MPs in 2015 after the loss of the majority of their seats. The Conservatives have rejected AWS, instead relying on Women2Win, an organisation founded by Theresa May and Baroness (Ann) Jenkin in 2005, to identify, motivate and train female parliamentary candidates.

One way to look at the parties’ progress in selecting women candidates is to look at new seats, i.e. seats they do not currently hold. As Table 1 shows, the number of female candidates nominated for new seats by the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats has changed very little from 2015 to 2017. Women candidates make up between 28% and 37% of all new selections for each party across these two elections, but only the Lib Dems have increased the proportion of women selected, from 28% in 2015 to 30% in 2017. But with as many as 163 female incumbents re-standing between the three parties, the overall proportion of female candidates for Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems has risen from 29% to 33%.

The Constitution Unit in the Department of Political Science at University College London is the UK’s leading research body on constitutional change.

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